The federal judge who has become the face of opposition to President Donald Trump has long-running ties to an exchange program with the United States’ most powerful global rival.
Judge James Boasberg, chief justice for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has been a thorn in the Trump administration’s side since the president returned to the White House in 2025.
But years before that, he was playing host to an organization with ties to the Chinese Communist Party even while serving on a court privy to some of the United States’ most sensitive information, according to documents publicized by a conservative journalist Thursday.
Natalie Winters is an investigative journalist and executive editor of “War Room,” the podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, who served briefly as chief strategist in Trump’s first-term White House.
In a Substack piece published Thursday, she detailed Boasberg’s ties to the China-United States Exchange Foundation.
The name sounds anodyne, but its activities are suspicious enough that the foundation was the subject of a November 2025 letter to Columbia University from the chairman of the House Select Committee on China, asking Columbia to end its ties with the group because it is part of a Chinese government system known as “United Front” — a propaganda effort committed to advancing the causes of the Chinese Communist Party.
Hellbound and Down 